[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 13 (Wednesday, February 5, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S991-S993]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               EDUCATION

  Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I want to spend a few minutes commenting 
on some of the points the President made last night in his State of the 
Union Address. I was particularly impressed and encouraged about his 
decision to make education the centerpiece of that speech and his 
decision to make education the first priority of his administration 
this next 4 years.
  One aspect of what he talked about in education, I think, is 
extremely important, and that is standard setting. We have had debates 
in Congress for many years now about the issue of standards. In fact, I 
introduced legislation in 1990 to establish national standards in 
education, and, of course, we are continuing to pursue that through the 
National Education Goals Panel, which I serve on along with Senator 
Jeffords.
  I am persuaded that part of what the American people would like to 
see in their educational system is higher standards and more 
accountability. They want to be sure that teachers are performing to a 
high standard, students are performing to a high standard, and the 
parents of children in our public schools want to know where their 
children stand relative to other students around the country, around 
their State, and in general.
  The President in particular talked about how he was going to work 
through the Department of Education to adapt two widely used high-
quality tests--the fourth grade NAEP reading test, the National 
Assessment of Educational Progress, which is already being used in more 
than 40 States, and the now-familiar eighth grade math test, the TIMSS 
test, which recently confirmed how poorly many of our students are 
doing relative to the achievement level of other nations.
  The President proposed adapting those two tests into a new test that 
will be available free of charge to every student, every school 
district, and every State in the Nation that wishes to participate in 
it. This is going to be done in the next 2 years.
  I think this will be a major step forward, because what it will do is 
to allow us to give very hard, objective information about which of our 
schools are succeeding and which of our schools are failing. We have 
the anomalous situation that, because of our inability to track 
performance, we have in many school districts and major cities in the 
country some schools that are doing superbly and other schools that are 
doing miserably. Parents, unfortunately, sometimes do not even know 
which of those two schools their children are in.
  For this reason, we need to give parents clear indications of which 
schools are doing the best job in educating students. Currently, we 
have a hodgepodge of different tests, a hodgepodge of different 
standards around the country. Parents who are interested in finding out 
how their children are doing often are misled by inaccurate 
information. So I very much commend the President for this initiative 
to adapt these two well-recognized tests into something which each 
student can take, each parent can understand, each school can 
understand. I think that will be a major step forward.
  Let me also talk about another aspect of the standards issue, which 
the President, I hope, will also move ahead on very aggressively, and 
that is the teaching of advanced placement courses. Many of us are 
familiar with advanced placement courses because of our own children 
going through high school. These are courses that are taught in the 
11th and 12th grades, generally to students who are planning to go on 
to college and who want to get advanced credit so they can avoid taking 
the same course once they get there.
  We have not done what we should at the national level to encourage 
States and school districts to expand instruction in advanced placement 
courses. I believe this year, for the first time, we will see a change 
in that. I hope to see the President, in the budget we receive 
tomorrow, requesting some funds to assist low-income students in the 
cost of taking those advanced placement courses and tests. That, I 
believe, would be another major step forward.

  I had the chance to speak to the New Mexico Legislature on Monday of 
this week, and I talked to them about the challenge that my State faces 
in expanding access to advanced placement classes. These courses should 
be available to all students. They are highly demanding, but any 
willing student can succeed in them.
  Many people know about the advanced placement program because of a 
movie that came out several years ago called ``Stand and Deliver.'' 
This was a movie that Edward James Olmos starred in. It was the story 
of Jaime Escalante, a high school calculus teacher, I believe in 
Garfield High School in east Los Angeles. He had become very famous in 
that school and in that school district because of his success in 
teaching students, many of them students without a good academic 
grounding. He would teach those students this advanced placement course 
in calculus.
  The reason he became famous and the reason that movie was made was 
not because he was teaching any old calculus course. He was teaching a 
course that was an advance placement course so that anybody in the 
country who paid attention would know that was a high-quality course. 
If his students in east Los Angeles passed that course, they were every 
bit as good as any student in Manhattan, or Ohio, or in New Mexico, or 
anywhere else. So they got the recognition that they deserved. He got 
the recognition that he deserved. They were very proud of their 
achievement.
  I have believed for a very long time that one reason our school 
system falls short is that we expect too little of our students. We 
have low expectations for what our students can learn, what our 
children can learn. The truth is, if you expect very little, you will 
receive very little. We need to expect higher performance by our 
students, higher performance levels by our teachers, and through this 
advanced placement set of courses we do exactly that.
  New Mexico lags behind the national average fairly significantly in 
the per capita rate of 11th and 12th graders who take advance placement 
courses. In my State I think the percentage is something like 24 
percent. Nationally it is 40 percent. We need to do better than that. 
We can do better than that. We are setting about working with the 
business community and our State legislature to bring together the 
resources to expand the training of advanced placement teachers and to 
expand course work in advanced placement courses.

  I think one other point needs to be made. It should be obvious to 
everybody. You are not going to bring about a major reform of 
education, a major improvement and upgrading of education, without a 
very major program to reeducate and develop the human capacity to do 
that. We need to have training courses for our teachers in the summer. 
These advanced placement courses are very good. But, unfortunately, too 
few teachers are able to take advantage of them, or do take advantage 
of them.
  So we need to think seriously in this Congress about what we can do 
to support the retraining that is needed to get people to these higher 
standards that the President is talking about. This is an essential 
part of the agenda that we need to confront over the next couple of 
years.
  I commend again the President for his leadership in putting this on 
the front burner for the country. I hope we, in Congress, are up to the 
task of following his lead. I think he has identified a very important 
priority for our country. It is the one that I hear the most about.
  I get around New Mexico a lot, and people want to know why we can't 
do a better job of educating kids in this country. I hope that we can.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
  Mr. BINGAMAN. Yes. I am glad to yield.
  Mr. DORGAN. I was interested in the Senator's statement. He, I think, 
identifies one of the priorities of many of us in this Congress. If we 
do not make an investment in education of America's youth then the 
country does not have much of a future. I am enormously proud of what 
we have done in

[[Page S992]]

the investment in the Head Start Program, for example. This does not 
start in grade school or high school or college. It starts in the early 
intervention years with Head Start. The Head Start Program we know 
works. It produces enormous dividends. It gradually improves the 
opportunity of young people who come from difficult circumstances.
  But one of the things that it seems to me we should invest in is safe 
schools. First of all, if the school is not safe and the students feel 
insecure, they cannot learn. And the other ingredient is a teacher who 
knows how to teach--a good teacher, a student willing to learn, and a 
parent who cares. If any one of those are missing, it does not work 
very well.
  But let us talk about the safe school issue first. The Senator from 
New Mexico I know heard me describe on the floor a bill which I 
introduced late last year on this issue. If I might, with the 
indulgence of the Senator from New Mexico, I would like to describe 
again a circumstance that exists that I am trying to correct dealing 
with safe schools in New York City.
  A young boy came into a school with a loaded pistol in his belt and a 
jacket covering his loaded pistol. He went through the school, walked 
down the hallway to his classroom, and a security guard identified or 
saw the bulge in the young 16-year-old's jacket and apprehended this 
young boy and took a loaded pistol from this young fellow. A loaded 
pistol with this young fellow walking down the school hallway; the 
security guard removes it. It goes to court and goes to a disciplinary 
proceeding. The result of it all was that the court said the 
exclusionary rule applied to the disciplinary proceeding and the 
security guard had no right to search that kid and take the gun away.
  When I read that I thought, ``Can this be right? Could anybody use 
that kind of strange thinking to conceive of that kind of decision?''
  You go to the airport and get on a plane going to New Mexico or North 
Dakota. They will run you through a metal detector because they say, 
``You can't get on an airplane with a gun. We will not allow it.'' But 
it is OK to go through a school hallway to a classroom with a loaded 
pistol with a 16-year-old. I do not think so. That does not make any 
sense to me.

  So I introduced legislation dealing with that issue. The exclusionary 
rule, my eye. A 16-year-old and a loaded pistol--I want a security 
guard to take that pistol away in a schoolroom because my kids and 
yours and all of the kids in this country deserve to be safe in school.
  That is the first element: Safety in school.
  The second is what the Senator from New Mexico is talking about: 
Directing investment into programs that we know work and we know yield 
significant returns. He talked about good teachers, and the President 
talked about attracting and keeping good teachers in our classrooms. 
Nothing could be more important than that because we send our kids to 
someone else most of the day. We place them in their hands. I have been 
in a school that the Senator from New Mexico has. He knows some of 
these teachers. I leave that school thinking, ``Wow, this is an 
incredible person. What a job they do with these young kids.'' There 
are times when perhaps you find something that you think isn't quite 
right. The President addressed that last night.
  But the key, it seems to me, is matching the three things: First, a 
teacher who really knows how to teach; a kid who is willing to learn; 
and a parent who cares about that kid's education and is with that kid 
at the end of the day before they go to bed at night, reviewing the 
homework. All of those elements come together to make an educational 
system work.
  But the Senator from New Mexico is right. We need in this country at 
the State and local level and at the Federal level to decide that the 
education of our children is a priority for us because educating our 
children is an investment in our country's future.
  I really appreciate the statement which the Senator from New Mexico 
made.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. I appreciate, Mr. President, the statement of the 
Senator from North Dakota.
  Let me just add one other element to this. I commend him for his 
proposal to deal with the problem of someone coming into school with a 
gun and no one being able to apprehend him. I am also persuaded that 
virtually everything we want to see happen better in our schools will 
be facilitated if we recognize that we need to have smaller classrooms.
  Much of the crime, discipline, and absentee problems in our schools 
today are because the schools are too large and because the teachers do 
not know the students by their first names. The students don't feel 
accountable to their peers. We put 40 kids into a class and wonder why 
the teacher can't teach all of them. We put 2,000 or 3,000 kids in a 
high school and wonder why the principal can't keep track of everybody.
  There have been some very good studies done that show that the 
optimum size for a high school, for example, is somewhere between 600 
and 900 kids, and that when you go over 900 the quality of the 
students' performances start dropping, the discipline problems start 
rising, and the incidence of criminal problems start rising. We need to 
factor this issue into what we do as well.
  Of course, we in Congress don't make the laws that govern the size of 
the schools, and we should not. But we need to encourage States and 
local school districts to take that into account when they decide to 
build a new high school. You don't necessarily need to tear down the 
old building. You can take an existing complex and break it into two or 
three high schools just as well as leaving it in one 3,000-person high 
school.
  Mr. DORGAN. If the Senator will yield further, Mr. President, I was 
in a school recently called the Ojibwa School on an Indian reservation 
in North Dakota. When the Senator from New Mexico talks about 
construction, the President last evening talked about our trying to 
provide help to State and local governments with respect to school 
construction. I can tell you that in the Ojibwa School, and others that 
I have visited, there is a significant need for some construction, some 
maintenance, and some repair. I worry very much that these little kids 
on that Indian reservation going to this school are going to be in 
significant trouble some day because the repairs have not been made. 
That school is not a safe school. We have report after report and 
investigation after investigation. Now we have another one going on. 
But we very much need to invest in the infrastructure of these schools.
  The Senator from New Mexico is right. We do not run the schools, and 
should not. Local school boards should run the local schools, and the 
States are involved largely in the State judgments about what the 
curriculum is, and so on. But we can marginally help in a range of 
other ways and do Head Start and college. We also can help in the kinds 
of things the President recommended in providing some resources for 
school construction in areas where you need to have some additional 
construction to repair and bring up to standard some of our schools.
  Again, I say finally, the question around here is always a question 
of choices: What is your priority?
  Two years ago, I was on this floor talking about the strange sense I 
had when I looked at a budget document offered and actually passed--it 
was subsequently vetoed--which said let us double the amount of money 
we spend for star wars and let us cut by half the amount of money we 
spend for Star Schools. Star Schools was not a very big program, but it 
was a really interesting program--directed investment to try to help 
certain people. I just thought that was a strange priority. But the 
priority I hope for all of us is to find some way to advance the 
opportunity to improve our schools in this country for the future of 
this country.
  I appreciate the Senator from New Mexico yielding.
  Mr. BINGAMAN. I appreciate the Senator from North Dakota and his 
comments.
  Let me say one other thing and then I will yield the floor, Mr. 
President. I was on a radio interview program earlier this morning, and 
one of the reporters, who is a very knowledgable reporter, said to me, 
``The President said we ought to increase funding for education by 20 
percent. That is a very major increase. Can we afford that kind of an 
increase given the budgetary constraints on us?''

[[Page S993]]

  My response was that you have to look at this in the context of the 
overall Federal budget. In the overall Federal budget, we spend 
somewhere near 1.5 percent on education, which represents less than 10 
percent of overall spending by States and localities. So what the 
President is saying is that we ought to spend 1.8 percent, or 
thereabouts, on education. Most of the people I talk to in New Mexico 
do not think that is excessive. I think it is not unreasonable for the 
Federal Government to give education that high a priority.
  So I hope very much we follow the President's lead. I hope very much 
we will make education the centerpiece of our efforts here in this 
105th Congress.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Roth and Mr. Moynihan pertaining to the 
submission of Senate Resolution 50 are located in today's Record under 
``Submission of Concurrent and Senate Resolutions.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware is recognized.
  Mr. ROTH. I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mr. Roth and Mr. Lieberman pertaining to the 
submission of Senate Concurrent Resolution 5 are located in today's 
Record under ``Submission of Concurrent and Senate Resolutions.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mr. Roth pertaining to the introduction of S. 266 are 
located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and 
Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. ROTH. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gregg). The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. McCain. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. McCain. Mr. President, I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mr. McCain pertaining to the introduction of S. 268 
are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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